10.16.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Rebeccah Shore for Radio Eye, and today
I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated September October
twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio E is a
reading service intended for people who are blind or have
other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
Please join me now for the first part of the article.

(00:23):
From flower markets and colonial forts to shrines and battle fields,
take a journey into the heart of India. Traveling down
a river in West Bengal reveals the enduring imprint of
empire and the soul of a region shaped by centuries
of change. By Joshua Hammer. The morning temperature was pushing

(00:46):
ninety degrees as I made my way on foot past
the Haurah railway station in Kolkata, the capital of the
Indian state of West Bengal. Following a guide, I wove
through a cross brush of traders, civil servants and other commuters.
On the Hajab Bridge, a steel cantileave span over the

(01:07):
Hugli River. Down below, on a concrete platform extending into
the river, the Mullakgat flower market was in full swing.
Trucks from the countryside disgorged huge piles of roses, sunflowers
and gladioli, and garlands of yellow and orange marigolds. Couriers
placed the bundles on their heads and darted through a

(01:29):
maze of wooden stalls as hundreds of customers haggled with
shopkeepers over the prices of floral displays for weddings, cremations
and religious festivals. This relentless cycle of buying and selling
has gone on seven days a week, every week of
the year since the flower market, now one of the
largest in Asia, was founded in eighteen fifty five. Above

(01:53):
many stalls, I noticed alcoves into which shopkeepers crawled at night,
clambering down at dawn to begin another day of frenzied commerce.
Kolkata has always been a city that tends toward extremes.
When I first visited in nineteen eighty one, I walked
out of the railway station and found myself enveloped in

(02:15):
a scene that could have come from the febrile imagination
of Hieronymus Bosch. Refugee families from the impoverished countryside, cooking
and sleeping on broken sidewalks, barefoot rickshaw wallahs pulling their
two wheelers through diesel choked streets and alleys, volunteers from
Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying Destitute, coaxing the desperately

(02:38):
ill to the charity's shelter to die in relative comfort.
Beyond this dystopian scene rose remnants of the British Empire,
which ruled here for two centuries before India gained independence
in nineteen forty seven, spired Anglican churches, marble memorials, neo
classical buildings where the empire builders once worked. Returning four

(03:01):
decades later, I found that while much had changed, some
things had not. My guide brought me back to the
Indian Coffee House, housed in an iconic nearly one hundred
and fifty year old establishment, packed with students and writers,
smoking and talking beneath lazily spinning sealing fans. We browsed

(03:23):
overflowing bookstalls on College Street that testified to the city's
vibrant intellectual life, exemplified by such locally bred Nobel Prize
winners as the writer Rabindranath Tagore, once a regular at
the Indian Coffee House, and the economist of Marchesen. But
the city I encountered in the early nineteen eighties now

(03:45):
a megalopolis of roughly twenty million people has become an
increasingly globalized commercial center. Economic modernization was already under way
when West Bengal's Marxist regional government was voted out of
office in twenty eleven after thirty four years in power.
Subsequent reforms and initiatives have continued to help launch the

(04:09):
state into the twenty first century. First Coca Cola came
to Kokota, and then mobile phones, then everything else. Manadipa Banerjee,
of political journalists and broadcaster in Kolkata told me the
barefoot rickshaw wallas are still there, but now they share
the streets with B M w's Mercedes and other luxury vehicles.

(04:34):
Glittering shopping malls and art galleries add to an increasingly
international atmosphere. Last year, West Bengal's economy grew by nearly
seven percent. With my guide, I made my way down
to the bank of the Hugli River, lined with crematoriums, warehouses,
Hindu temples and metal pipes gushing raw sewage into the water.

(04:57):
The river's name probably comes from the town of Hugli,
founded by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Traders from
the Netherlands, France, Britain and Denmark soon followed, setting up
rival posts aimed at grabbing a share of Bengal's riches.
In August sixteen ninety, Job Charnock, an agent from the

(05:18):
East India Company, the British trading firm, created a commercial
post near this spot. A nearby village was called Calikata,
possibly named after Cali, the fore armed, red eyed goddess
of time, death and destruction. The British called the city Calcutta,
but local officials changed the name in two thousand one

(05:40):
to reflect Bengali pronunciation. Over the next century, as Calkata
grew into a vibrant city, the company became something of
a god itself. It raised an army, defeated local rulers,
seized control of taxation, monopolized the global trade and cotton, indigo,
and opium, and conquered most of modern day India, as

(06:04):
well as what are now Pakistan, Bangladesh and Mayanmar before
it was phased out of existence in the late eighteen hundreds.
The East India Company laid the foundations for the Raj
the British Empire in India, which would extend its reach
around the globe. And come to shape the modern world.

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Many of the firm's earliest operations and conquests took place
along the Hugli, the Gang's westernmost distributary, also known as
the Bagharathi. The river flows south from near Mrshahabad, the
capital of the old Bengali Kingdom, for one hundred and
sixty miles through pasture, swamp land, rice paddies and jungle

(06:47):
before emptying into the Bay of Bengal. Until recently, most
of the towns and villages, shrines and forts, battlefields, palaces,
and other historically significant sites were little of the visited,
even by Indians who lived nearby. But the globalization of
Kolkata has opened the region and several river boat companies

(07:09):
have begun to offer tourists, mostly Europeans and Americans, but
increasingly Indians too, the chance to explore at an intimate
distance a critical part of India's history. I too was
curious to learn more of this history by following the
trading firm's path, So one April, day before the pre

(07:30):
monsoon heat ground river traffic to a halt, I joined
a seven day cruise that would take me upstream from
Kolkata to the Faraka Barrage, a dam that diverts water
from the Ganges to maintain navigable water levels in the Hugli.
Along the way, I observed not only the firm's residual
imprint on the places it once ruled, but also West

(07:53):
Bengal's modernizing ethos, its religious and cultural diversity, and a
spirit of resistance and national pride shaped by two hundred
years of foreign domination. Long ago, Bengal was part of
Ashaka the Great's vast empire before emerging in the eighth
century a d as a major Buddhist power ruled by

(08:15):
the Pala dynasty. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Bengal
was an independent sultanate whose territory comprised an area including
modern day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. Then,
in the sixteenth century, the Mughals, a Muslim dynasty from
Central Asia, began conquering territories across the Indian subcontinent, and

(08:41):
in fifteen seventy six, the Mughal emperor Akbar defeated the
Bengali sultan Daud Khan Karani and cemented the Mugals hold
of the region. With its ample rainfall and rich soil.
Mugal Bengal thrived as a producer and exporter of silk, cotton,
and a bounty of other agricultural products. The Mughals ruled

(09:05):
through a viceroy known as the Newab based in the
palace at Mrishadabad. The position became hereditary, and as Mughal
power waned in the seventeen hundreds, the Nawabs gained de
facto and dependence and amassed tremendous riches. For centuries, Hindus
and Muslims jockeyed for dominance while imprinting their faiths across

(09:29):
the landscape. That changed in nineteen forty seven, when the
departing British rulers, with the grudging assent of most Indian
political leaders, partitioned India. Bengal was split into the Hindu
dominated Indian state of West Bengal and Muslim East Pakistan,
which later became Bangladesh, sending millions of Hindus and Muslims

(09:52):
fleeing in opposite directions. Hundreds of thousands of people died
in the chaos, and West bengals Uslim population fell below
twenty percent. Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal called partition. The central
historical event in twentieth century South Asia. At the route

(10:13):
of that imperial legacy was the East India Company, which
over a century seized control of Bengal and created a
model for its conquest of the rest of India. The
morning after my walking tour of Kolkata, I boarded a
motorized launch from a riverside quai to the Rajmahal, the

(10:34):
King's palace in Hindi. The three deck, one hundred and
sixty four foot long ship is one of five luxury
vessels operated by a joint British Indian company known as
Assam Bengal Navigation, which runs river tours here as well
as on the Brahmaputra River in northeast India and along

(10:56):
the main stem of the Ganges. The deck was polished wood,
the cabins appointed with large French windows offering panoramic river views.
As the boat raised its anchor and sailed beneath the
Hawra Bridge, we met Simbankar Sengupta, a balding, bespectacled and
professorial guide, who strode the deck wearing a floppy safari hat.

(11:21):
Sengupta would lead us a dozen travelers from England, Australia
and France through riverine villages, and most evenings he held
lectures in the saloon on the main deck, conversing authoritatively
on everything from French colonial forts, to local bird life
to the Hindu gods and their avatars. Twenty four hours

(11:42):
and twenty five miles later, we docked at Chandanagar. Founded
as a trading post by the French East India Company,
the British firm's main rival, in the late seventeenth century.
The city remained a pocket of French colonial rule until
shortly after India independence. Macaques with pigtails frolicked along the

(12:04):
strand the town's riverfront promenade, lined with traces of that era.
We passed a nineteenth century ecole or grammar school for girls,
a Roman Catholic church that reminded me of a scale
down Notre Dame, and a neglected museum filled with crockery,
military uniforms and portraits of bygone French commanders. A diirama

(12:29):
displayed a miniature Fort dour Lean, a mud walled fortress
erected in sixteen ninety six that stood for decades as
a symbol of French power. In March seventeen fifty seven,
shortly after the outbreak of the Seven Years War that
involved many European nations, two British warships sailed up the

(12:50):
Hugli from Kolkata and attacked Fort Dourleon. The French were
not ready for any war, Sengupta explained, they were not
ext an attack. Even so, the fort's guns damaged the
British fleet, killing thirty seven sailors on the British HMS Tiger.

(13:10):
A British East India Company infantry brigade led by Robert Clive,
a pugnacious thirty one year old from Shropshire and the
West Midlands, England, aided the naval assault. After a fierce bombardment,
the French finally abandoned the fort. Clive, who had been
sent to India by his landowner father fourteen years earlier

(13:33):
to wean him from a life of petty crime, would
soon transform himself into the most consequential British military leader
in eighteenth century India. Three months after the French defeat
at Chandanagar, Clive and a British East India Company force,
accompanied by boats carrying additional soldiers and supplies, marched eighty

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five miles along the river to Plasey, an Anglicized name
for the Bengali village of Palachi. This time they were
out for revenge against a different foe, Bengal's young French
backed Newab, Sir Rajudula. The previous year, worried about the
East India Company's growing power, the Nawab had sent his

(14:17):
troops to Kolkata, where they captured a British fort and
imprisoned many dozens of British soldiers in a dungeon that
became known as the Black Hole of Calcutta. In one night,
all but twenty one of the men suffocated or died
of heat stroke. Now at Plasi, as Clive remembered it,

(14:38):
the Nawab commanded a force of thirty five thousand sepoys
were Indian infantrymen, fifteen thousand cavalry, fifty cannons and numerous
battle elephants, as well as a few French army officers
working alongside him against their English rivals. Clive arrived with
just eight hundred European soldiers, twenty two hundred se poise

(15:00):
and eight cannons. The most singular sight presented to the
British was the Nawab's artillery, wrote one nineteenth century historian.
They were all drawn by beautiful white oxen behind every
gun and elephant, pushing with his great strength. But unknown
to the Nawab, a duplicitous Bengali general mir Jafar had

(15:23):
made a secret deal with Clive. He would march his
troops to Plassey, but keep them on the sidelines when
the fighting started. In return, Clive would help to make
him the new Niwab if Seraj were defeated. Mer Jafar's
betrayal caused the Mughal forces to flee in panic. Then,

(15:44):
after a rainstorm damaged the Bengali's gunpowder, further neutralizing their advantage.
Seraj's army quickly fell apart. The Niwab himself escaped on
a camel. A motorized launch took us from the Rajmah
to see the battle site, docking on the east bank
of the Hugli. From there, a fleet of electric three

(16:06):
wheelers or tuptooks bore us past groves of banyan trees, bananas, bamboo,
and coconut palms. The road dead ended at an asphalt
plaza carved out of the bush that was dominated by
a stone obelisk erected by the British in the early
nineteen hundreds. It was marked simply Battlefield of Plase June

(16:29):
twenty third, seventeen fifty seven. The battlefield lay to our left,
now a sweep of farmland that extended to the river.
We continued down a path. Plots of green chilis, beans
and corn, divided by earthen dykes, covered the terrain where
tens of thousands of troops and their elephants had faced

(16:50):
each other in combat. Amid the plots, I spotted a
brick platform mounted by three obelisks, each marking the remains
of a Bengali general killed by artillery or sniper fire.
Besides the stone obelisk in the plaza, it was the
only evidence that a battle had taken place here. Just

(17:10):
five hundred soldiers died at Plasi, Segupta told us as
we walked the path, but it was a war that
changed the history of India forever. Sarraj was captured soon
afterward while hiding along the river. According to one story,
a Hindu ascetic recognized him by the regal shoes he

(17:31):
was wearing. He was soon stabbed to death by an
assassin acting under orders from Mir Jafar's son. Mir Jafar
became the new NEWAB, and Clive pledged him East India
Company's support in exchange for control over much of the
trade in Bengal. With this victory, the whole balance of

(17:52):
power in India had now shifted. The historian William Dalrymple
wrote in The Anarchy, his twenty nineteen history of the Firm,
the British had become the dominant military and political force
in Bengal. In seventeen sixty four, at the Battle of Buksar,
East India Company soldiers defeated a unified army of the

(18:14):
Megal Emperor and two newabs, including Mir Kassim, mir Jafar's
successor as Bengal's ruler, who had turned against the British.
The Emperor now granted the East India Company the right
to tax Bengalis in return for an annual tribute. It
was a windfall worth hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

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Clive's victory made him the de facto ruler of Bengal
and one of the richest men in England. Over the
next five decades, the company continued its expansion through outright
territorial conquest and treaties with Indian rulers, eliminating virtually all
resistance by the early eighteen hundreds. One sultry morning, we

(19:00):
embarked at Baranagar, a sleepy village of tin roofed bungalows
on the river's west bank. Singupta led us down dirt
alleys to a clearing where we gazed on a red
terra cotta Hindu temple complex called char Bangla, one of
several commissions here by Rani Babani, an eighteenth century zamindar

(19:22):
or feudal landlord. In the seventeen fifties, she went on
a pilgrimage and stopped in this village on her way
there and liked it. Singgupta told us Murushabad had the Newabs,
and she probably decided to create a rival Hindu center.
Richly detailed carvings depicted scenes from the Mahabarata and Rambayana,

(19:45):
the two sacred epochs of Hinduism. A frieze at the
bottom of shar Bangla showed an East India Company cavalry
officer leading a column of rifle bearing sepoys, a startling
snapshot of the ara that had worked its way into
fanciful tableaus of dragons, cobras and ancient warriors. A few

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hundred yards away, down a path lined with palm, mango
and banana trees, stood a pastel blue painted schoolhouse where
a dozen teenage boys and girls were poised over composition books.
A few years ago, Saind Gupta explained, a young man
from the village began practicing his English with the western

(20:29):
tourists who would descend on Baranagar from the Rajmahal every
few weeks. As his English improved, he came up with
an idea. With modest financing from a San Bengal navigation,
he launched the Baranagar English Tuition Center, in which village kids,
for a small fee, come to learn the language for

(20:50):
two hours a day, three mornings a week, before or
after attending regular classes at their government school. Today, the
tour company subsidizes students who need financial assistance and is
building two new class rooms to meet growing demand. A
sixteen year old girl showed me her application to an

(21:10):
international learning program in South Korea, where English was the
language of instruction. There are students from all over the
world there, she told me excitedly. It was a vivid
reminder of one outcome of British imperialism, the importance of
English as a ticket to a better future. Bengal became

(21:31):
the first region of India in which English language education
took hold. The British founded India's first newspaper in Kolkata
in seventeen eighty, opened its first English language medical college
in eighteen thirty five, and founded the University of Calcutta
in the eighteen fifties. The spread of literacy and the

(21:53):
English language was one of the positives of colonialism, Banerjee,
the Bengali political journalist, told me, though she hastened to add,
nearly every Indian would say that we are better off
in charge of our own destiny. For both the upper
castes attending boarding schools in India and Britain and village

(22:14):
kids scrambling to escape from poverty and isolation, the language
opened a world of possibility. Not far from Baranagar lies Mrshidabad,
the former capital of the Bengali Nawabs. Disembarking from the Rajmahal,
I walked along another river front promenade lined with tin

(22:36):
roofed market stalls no different from those of the half
dozen towns I'd visited in the past few days, But
turning a corner, I was confronted with a remarkable sight.
The neo classical Italianate Palace, apparently inspired by Buckingham Palace,
complete with the colonnaded central portico and two vast wings

(22:59):
painted yellow, sprawling across a manicured lawn, designed by Duncan McLoyd,
a Scottish architect with the Bengal Corps of Engineers, and
constructed between eighteen twenty nine and eighteen thirty seven. The
Hasiduari Palace, the palace of one thousand doors, was the
symbolic seat of the Niwabs for more than a century

(23:22):
until the Indian government stripped them of their properties after
the nineteen forty seven Independents. Yet by the time the
Niwabs moved in, their power had already dissipated. It was
the East India Company's governors who called the shots, relegating
the Nawabs to ritualistic displays of pomp in their palace

(23:43):
and gardens. Along with hundreds of Indian tourists, I walked
through two floors of galleries filled with treasures, carved Chinese ivory, armour,
swords and scabbards, palanquins and carriages, ceramic faces, and oil
portraits of the Nawabs. One large painting depicted the signing

(24:04):
of the seventeen sixty five Treaty of Allahabad, which followed
the Battle of Busar. The crowded tableau showed the defeated
Magal Emperor, draped in sumptuous robes, reclining beneath the parasol
and surrounded by courtiers mounted on elephants. He was conferring
upon Clive Pudgy, clad in a red rock coat, the Dewani,

(24:30):
the right to collect revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.
I gazed upon a portrait of Lord Charles Cornwallis, who
was appointed Governor General of Bengal in seventeen eighty six,
five years after surrendering to George Washington New Yorktown, Virginia.
Cornwallis cut down on corruption and nepotism within the East

(24:51):
India Company, codified laws and consolidated control over much of India,
setting the stage for the ascendants of the That evening,
I stood on the top deck of the raj Mahal,
sipping a gin and tonic as streaks of pink and
scarlet softly illuminated banana groves, meadows and rice fields. We

(25:13):
sailed past a party for the Solar New Year, when
Hindus gathered to celebrate in exuberant style. Temples were strung
up with lights, loud speakers blared tiny religious music, and
hundreds of people clustered along the ghat the stairs leading
to the water, to bathe and to pray. It was
a reminder that Bengali life, religion, and culture had remained resilient,

(25:38):
surviving centuries of mismanagement and theft by the regions Magal
and later British rulers. After the Magal Emperor granted Clive
the Dewani, British tax collectors extorted the Bengali peasantry to
raise funds and enrich themselves, precipitating widespread poverty. KLi I

(26:00):
have returned permanently to England in seventeen sixty seven and
one election to Parliament. Meanwhile, in the late seventeen sixties,
a devastating drought caused the local rice grout to fail,
with grain stores empty. After the East India Company's short
sighted managers had stopped maintaining them. A famine took cold

(26:21):
in seventeen sixty nine and seventeen seventy, in which one
third of Bengal's population died. Whistleblowers from the company went
public in England with stories of mismanagement and mass death,
and a furior erupted in Parliament and the press. We
have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped, thundered the historian Horace Walpole.

(26:45):
As the extent of the devastation became clear, Clive in
England was publicly mocked. One satire called him Lord Vulture,
deaf to every sentiment of justice and humanity, whose avarice
knows no bounds. In Parliament, Clive passionately defended himself to
general ridicule. Given the riches available to him to plunder,

(27:09):
He proclaimed, I stand astonished by my own moderation. But
on November twenty second, seventeen seventy four, Clive, depressed, ailing
and facing withering criticism in the House of Commons, cut
his throat with a penknife at his home in London's
Berkeley Square. He was forty nine years old. Several years ago,

(27:29):
British protesters launched a drive to remove Clive's statues at
Whitehall in central London and in his birthplace in Shropshire,
with one petition decrying what it called an outdated monument.
Shropshire's local council rejected a proposal to remove its statue,
but it agreed to add a free standing plaque that
addresses the pernicious effects of Clive's rule. In Whitehall, the

(27:53):
statue remained standing unadorned. This concludes readings from the Smithsonian
magazine for to day day. Your reader has been Rebecca Shore.
Thank you for listening, and have a great day.